Well I just finished building a new pc, or more appropriately upgraded my old one as only half the parts are new. My old pc was over 3 years old and so it was about time for an upgrade. I can safely say I hope I don't have to do it for another 3 years or more, as this was a huge pain in the ass.

I recieved all my parts on friday (I ordered them online). So like a kid at christmas time I opened the package and stood in awe at the brand new parts in their fancy packaging. After pulling myself out of the trance I got to work on the pc. I'm a very meticulous person, so I was very careful while installing every component. I've built a number of computers now so this didn't take long as I knew what I was doing. Once everything was installed, I hooked up the power, monitor, keyboard and mouse, and I turned the system on.... nothing. No display, no beep, nothing. After some thinking I decided it must be the power supply (as the one I had on there was a very cheap one). I had read somewhere that my video card needed quite a beefy power supply. After a nice talk to the customer service rep for my video card (EVGA is the maker and they have, bar none, the best customer services I have ever seen) I confirmed that a new power supply would be required. I took a trip down to the local computer shop (great bunch of guys that own and operate that store) and purchased a PSU that was not only perfect in specs, but even more perfect in price (beating out the online competition by a sizable margin, a rarity these days). I returned home and hooked up everything to the new PSU. Problem solved right? Nope. Same issue was still present. So after some research on the internet I decided the ram must be causing the problem. After another trip to the same shop (and an excellent deal on some really nice ram) I tested the system with the new stuff and yet again no cigar. So now obviously I'm pissed. I ran a bench test (where you run the system with the most minimum components in order to deduct the problem) and discovered that the board would not only not emit a POST beep, but it also wouldn't emit any warning beeps at all. I was exhasted and figured the board must be dead. The next day I decided to have the guys at the computer shop take a look at it, and sure enough the board was in fact dead. I decided to buy a board off of them instead (as it was cheaper and was made by a far more reliable and favourable company, MSI) and I will be returning this other board to the place I bought it from. The kicker is I have to pay the shipping (as is standard with most online store returns) but at least I will be getting a a full refund (no restocking fee).

Anyway the pc is now up and running and MSI has yet again bailed me out of a bad mobo situation. A similar situation happened when I built my old pc 3 years ago using an ultra crapy Soyo board (never EVER buy anything made by those wack jobs), and it was replaced by an MSI board that has been finctioning beautifully to this day. The maker of the culprit this time around was Asus and I should of gone with my gut instinct to avoid them initially. I do realize a bad mobo can come from any manufacturer, but its kind of funny that it happens when I decide to take a chance with a company I don't particularily like or trust (had built a system for a friend with one of their mobos and while it is working, it did have some issues). Anyway it will be MSI from here on out and the only thing stopping me from buying their mobos and ONLY their mobos is if they stop making them or go out of business.

I have learned that:

1) I should never buy a motherboard online, as thats just asking for trouble with such an integral part of a system

2) Only go with MSI when it comes to motherboards (I have built 4 systems with MSI boards and all have worked wonderfully).

3) Computers are a b****.

For those who want to know what parts I used to build my new system, here you go:

New

Intel Core2Duo E6600 (Conroe) cpu (recent price drop and free SupCom game made this a better buy than an AMD, which I would normally go with)

EVGA E-Geforce 8800 GTS 320 mb video card (these guys offer amazing quality, warranty and customer service while also beating everyone else in price, the best value for a video card I have ever seen)

MSI P965 Neo-F Motherboard (basic stable board, this is all I ever ask of my boards)

Two 1 GB sticks (in dual channel) of Crucial Rendition Ram (I'm a cheap ass I know, but this stuff works great)

Cooler Master Extreme Power Duo 600W PSU

Cheap "Power Up!" case I bought a while ago (very sturdy and looks pretty cool to)

Old

160 GB Samsung SATA Spindrive HDD

120 GB Western Digital IDE HDD (3 years of almost constant use and still kicking, gotta love WD)

Lite-On DVD RW/CD RW burner

Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor and the rest.

So there you have it, a recap of the PC from hell.

PS - Nvidia's drivers leave something to be desired. ATI had a much cleaner layout for their control system and much better options, at least on my old card. On the bright side though, Supreme Commander looks amazing and runs incredibly well on this new setup.